Thursday, March 26, 2009

Found this old book Billy Bunny and Daddy Fox at a used bookstore on Adams Avenue this week. There are a few good used book and magazine stores on that street and are worth spending some time in browsing. There were several volumes of the Billy Bunny series in the store but this one contained art I preferred over the others, even though one book contained a drawing of the Luckymobile tearing through a forest that I was loathe to pass up for the time being.

Billy Bunny was a series of books written in the 1920s by David Cory for children featuring the tales of a young rabbit and his many adventures. One of the main themes of the stories seems to be about Billy and his friends and their attempts to avoid being eaten by their carnivorous peers. From what I read, most of the entries are typical cautionary tales about trusting strangers and bachelor uncles.

Each book contains a few minimally colored illustrations credited to artist Hugh Spencer. The art is wonderfully simplistic and un-apologetically two-dimensional. I chose to purchase this volume in the series over the book containing the Luckymobile (reminiscent of Mr. Toad's Wild Ride) because I really got a kick out of the the two pages featuring the the bourgeois rabbit exploiting proletariat child labor and the ambushing bobcat.

2 comments:

Some of those illustrations make me feel like I'm being given a thematic apperception test. "Okay, can you tell me what's happening in this picture? And stop touching yourself there. Don't make me call for the orderly."